While most of us hanging around Game Front might be quick to affirm that we are PCs rather than Macs, it’s impossible to deny the impact on technology and culture that has been a direct result of the influence of Apple’s former CEO, Steve Jobs.

Jobs died this week at the age of 56. During his time as head of Apple, he was directly or indirectly responsible for every major product Apple has produced since the iMac, and under his leadership, the company grew to become one of the most powerful technology corporations in the world. The Mac computer line continues to pick up steam against PCs, and while mobile gaming existed on cell phones before Apple came on the scene, the genesis of the current industry of mobile gaming — and its huge, exponential growth in just four years — is pretty much directly due to the popularity of the iPhone and the iPad.

Similar is the explosion of casual gaming on Facebook and other social networks that, realistically, can be considered a segment of PC gaming. Though many of us kind of hate FarmVille and its legion of players, still — those are people who play games, and pay money for the privilege.

And now these two casual segments are beginning to bridge, and this is likely to be the beginning of a brave new era of gaming, at least to some degree. The popularity of mobile and casual gaming cannot be denied; much more likely is that traditional game developers will begin to adopt these new gameplay platforms and roll them into our existing gaming structure.

You can already play the Scrabble-like Words With Friends, a game developed by a studio Zynga purchased last year, on Facebook or on the iPhone (or comparable Android device), and you can play games against other players regardless of what platform they’re on. Already, this is a game you can start at home on your computer, then take with you on a mobile device and continue playing.

That sounds awfully like the germinating stage of what great gaming minds like Hideo Kojima are trying to accomplish. Konami’s “Transfarring” service will allow players to take their home console games on the road with them on handhelds. But there are mobile devices that are already on pace to do that; another good example is the game Dungeon Defenders, which will soon be available on consoles and PCs, and which will allow its users to play cooperatively with owners of the game using various mobile devices.

Jobs helped to revolutionize not just computers or the way people view a technology company, but the very idea of technology in general. Today we use devices people 20 years ago could only have dreamed about. We have powerful computers in our telephones, and we have the ability to connect with the world in untold ways, with little more effort than the tap of a finger.

A similar, slower wave may yet be sweeping through gaming. Grandmas play video games now. Video games are available not just on dedicated machines or on powerful PCs, but everywhere, and in everything. That’s kind of a great thing, if you think about it. In many ways, we’ve entered The Future in the last few years — thank Steve Jobs for playing a very, very big part in getting us there.

Run, don’t walk, to download Dead Space iOS RIGHT NOW for your iPhone or iPad — it’s down to just $0.99 this weekend, fro its usual lofty tag of $6.99 for the iPhone version and $9.99 for the iPad version.

There are a bunch of games on sale this weekend, in fact, from EA Mobile. Scrabble and Tetris are on the list, as are NBA Jam, Madden NFL 11, Fight Night Champion, Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 and a ton of others. Just hit the App Store and search for “Electronic Arts” to see the full list of iPhone and iPad discounts. Then get downloading.

Seriously, all the other game aside (except NBA Jam, which is phenomenal on the small screen), get Dead Space. If you have access to an iDevice and you don’t own Dead Space, you’re really doing yourself a disservice.

While mobile games can be great fun and even push blur the barrier between the capabilities of portables and smartphones, there’s one facet that’s usually painfully lacking: a physical, tactile and responsive control pad.

If that’s a concern for you and you’re willing to part with $75, though, you can order the iControlPad, a Bluetooth peripheral that snaps gamepad controls to your smartphone. It looks a whole lot like the signature slide-down gamepad that comes on Sony Ericsson’s newly announced Xperia Play.

Don’t go running for your credit card numbers just yet, though, iPhone gamers. While the control pad is compatible with Apple’s iDevices, as well as the Blackberry Touch, HTC Dream and T-Mobile G1 (among a handful of others), it might not be compatible with your games.

The iControlPad website mentions that the company behind the peripheral is working to get game developers to support the device. You’ll want to do some research before you shell out for this thing, as $74.99 is kind of steep for a device that might not work with your games. But if it does work, iControlPad could finally make all those Sega ports like Virtua Fighter II worth purchasing (because their on-screen controls are totally irritating).

It’s almost Valentine’s Day, and if you didn’t equate that with App Store game sales…well, I don’t blame you. But I’m here to correct that oversight.

Both EA Mobile and Gameloft have marked a substantial number of their top-tier games down to $0.99 for a limited time. Most of the games are pretty solid, especially for this price tag, although you won’t find newbies like Sacred Odyssey: Rise of Ayden or Dead Space on these lists. Also unfortunately absent is N.O.V.A. 2.

Still, check out the offerings below. If I can make some suggestions: from Gameloft, Spider-Man: Total Mayhem is kind of amazing as far as phone games are concerned, and the Uncharted knock-off Shadow Guardians just jumped onto my download queue. From EA, The Simpsons Arcade is a game you might remember from mid-1990′s movie theaters and there’s the full-featured Madden NFL 11, as well as mainstays like Tetris and Scrabble. Avoid Mass Effect Galaxy, however, unless you absolutely must have a boring, short tie-in game with a very small amount of Jacob/Miranda back story for Mass Effect 2.

I play a lot of mobile games, and that inevitably means that I play a lot of crappy ones. But they’re not all crappy — some are downright fun, and a few others are innovative and brilliant. But since they’re cheap, tiny and packed into the iTunes App Store, wading through all the games each week can be a daunting task. So we’ve streamlined it for you, picking out a few titles that are worth a look: check out the details below.

Dead Space

EA Mobile’s biggest published game to date is a pretty phenomenal horror experience for a mobile game. We reviewed it, so I won’t go to deep into the specifics. But If you haven’t checked it out yet, and you own an iPhone (or an iPad), you’re going to download this one.

It goes for $6.99 for iPhone, $9.99 for iPad.

Pro Zombie Soccer

Lots of games (on the iPhone) have you killing zombies, but this is the only one I know of that requires that you do so with a soccer ball. It actually works out to be a pretty interesting experience, with each stage making you a stationary turret on the left side of the screen, battling the onslaught of undead fiends coming at you from the right. Sliding your thumb along the left side of the screen allows you to set the angle of your kick, and then you let loose — each kick (mostly) destroying the zombie it hits. As you kill more monsters with headshots or otherwise, you’ll get access to temporary power-ups for your ball, like an orbital satellite, a rapid-fire, time-slowing version, or a ball covered in razor blades. But the zombies aren’t pushovers, either, and they gradually become stronger and require better tactics on your part to destroy. Over Pro Zombie’s Soccer’s 20 levels, the game gets more and more intense, with zombies coming at you awfully fast. For a casual game, Pro Zombie Soccer has a ton of personality and tense gameplay.

It goes for $0.99.

Stupid Zombies

Unlike Pro Zombie Soccer, Stupid Zombies is about puzzle-solving, but with headshots. Following closely the style of games like Angry Birds, your goal is to use physics to kill the zombies standing around each level. They won’t attack or otherwise harass you — you just have to figure out how to get a bullet to ricochet around each stage to kill them all or, to hit any number of objects like explosives, breakable crates, rolling barrels and steel boxes. The fewer shots you can use to kill all the zombies, the better your score over the game’s 240 levels. And if you’re unwilling to part with a buck, there’s a free version of Stupid Zombies with 60 levels in it. Your high scores get logged onto leaderboards using Apple’s Game Center service.

It goes for $0.99.

Mazeus

There are a lot of very cool aspects about Mazeus. For one, it includes some intensely complicated 3D mazes that require you to use touch controls to rotate them around in order to glean the their proper paths. For another, the game will generate randomized mazes for you, based on criteria that you specify with slider controls. Want a longer, more difficult maze than the game can provide? Jack the sliders up to maximum and see what Mazeus spits out. Navigating the mazes is done with a little colored ball that you guide through by tapping the path you want it to take. And by far the best part: it’s extremely, absolutely, 100-percent free.

BeamOut

Some iPhone games have you fighting aliens and protecting sheep — I’m not really sure what aliens want with sheep, but apparently it’s a recurring theme. BeamOut skips over the tower defense genre entirely (because apparently you normally need lasers to fight aliens who want sheep) and instead puts you in control of a downed UFO that’s looking to pick up sheep. Again, no idea why. Anyway, what’s cool (and super frustrating) about BeamOut is it’s loose, extremely challenging to use tilt control scheme. Your UFO slides across the ground as if its a pinball on ice, bouncing all over the place and off of lots of different things. Trying to catch sheep, hit targets, and avoid death is definitely not easy, and the game’s cartoonish art style makes it fun to look at as well as twitchy, fun and extremely difficult to play.

That’s what Ian Milham, one of Dead Space’s creators and the game’s art director, told CVG.

‘I’m absolutely interested in bringing Dead Space 2 to other platforms in the future, what’s key to us though is that we don’t do ports. We don’t do shabby conversions onto whatever platform it may be.

‘When we did Dead Space Extraction it was a quality game that uses and plays to the Wii’s strengths, which is the same as the movies and comic books,’ he said.

‘They’re not just tie-ins, they do a great job at whatever that particular media does.

‘When it comes to the [PSP2] or any other future platforms I’d be into it but I’d want to do something that plays to that platforms strengths rather than just a feeble version of a port.’

Sounds like Milham knows what he’s talking about as far as quality (except for Dead Space Ignition, that game was kind of terrible). Iron Monkey Studios’ Dead Space conversion for Apple’s iDevices is quite a quality game, and while it captures the Dead Space atmosphere, it’s not (quite) a straight port. It at least has its own story and environments.

According to Sony, most of the big franchise games we’ve seen on its NGP so far aren’t ports, but games being made specifically for the platform. So good news — if Dead Space joins them, you won’t feel like you’re paying for the same game twice. Hopefully.

It’s hard to get scares out of a small screen. A major part of the effectiveness of horror films is the environment in which you view them — in a dark theater with a huge screen, a scary movie is just a lot scarier. So trying to get a horror experience out of an iPhone game can be understandably difficult.

To put it succinctly: Dead Space on the iPhone and iPadnails it. Imminent danger, dark environments, lots of pop-out scares and a buckets of blood atmosphere create a phenomenal horror experience that pretty much stands alone in mobile gaming and wouldn’t be too far out of place as a small console game on Xbox Live or the Playstation Network.

Dead Space iOS takes place on the Sprawl, a huge space station orbiting Titan, a moon of Saturn that’s the focus of a mining operation. The location is the setting of Dead Space 2, and the story events of Dead Space iOS occur pretty much right before the start of the console sequel, with the iPhone game covering the events that kick off the release of monsters in both stories.

You play an engineer with a code name of Vandal, executing a secret mission on the Sprawl. I won’t give more details than that (although it doesn’t take long to get into what’s happening), but over the course of the next few hours (my initial run through the game took just over four hours to complete), you’ll battle a whole host of monsters called necromorphs, for those uninitiated into the Dead Space universe. You can still play Dead Space iOS without a great understanding of the Dead Space universe — just know that these monsters used to be people, and they’re vicious and horrible. And the best (and sometimes only) way to kill them is to cut off their limbs.

Iron Monkey has done a great job of transferring the Dead Space experience to the iPhone, but this is a little more than a version of the game you’ve already played. The iPhone game looks and feels a whole lot like Dead Space and Dead Space 2 on consoles, but the touch screen experience opens up the gameplay to be a little more intuitive. A melee weapon activated by swiping gets you out of desperate situations, and other enemies will require you to tap away to pull them off you. Touch screen aiming and movement feels good for the most part when you have a second to be precise, and the game smartly doesn’t include any buttons, only general movements you enact by touching large regions of the screen. You guide Vandal in a third-person view around by sliding your thumb on the left side of the screen — forward starts her running, backing toward the bottom of the screen slows or reverses her.

Aiming and shooting with the game’s four different weapons is done by tapping somewhere on the right side of the screen to ready your weapon, then dragging your thumb around to reposition your firing indicator. You also move the camera by sliding your thumb on the right side of the screen when you’re not firing. It gives you the effect of two analog sticks to guide you around the game, without the intrusion of virtual sticks on the screen. It also allows you to move your thumbs out of the way of the action — something that can be problematic on the iPhone’s smaller screen.

It takes a little getting used to, but after the first 20 minutes or so, the controls begin to feel like second nature — almost. On the whole, they’re a touch on the loose side; pulling up your gun or activating Vandal’s Stasis ability, for example, can be haphazard at times, especially when you’re trying to move fast and do several things at once. Because all the controls are dictated by your thumb placement and touch and they’re all generally in the same place, things can be clunky: you’ll sometimes find yourself accidentally squeezing off shots you didn’t mean to fire or trying to fire Stasis and failing, only to come under attack while you try to figure out what you did wrong. You can’t really strafe at all, and when you fail to kill enemies as they close in on you, you’ll likely just end up running past them, spinning around, and starting the process over again.

So you’ll never really dodge or find yourself in close calls. Instead, you’ll generally take the hit if you have to before sprinting clear of your attacker, then whipping around when you have some room to pull your gun up and take a well-aimed shot. It’s tense because you have a limited time to act, but combat is somewhat marred by the fact that you often have to stand rooted and just blast whatever’s coming your way. The fighting could have been much more dynamic and interesting with just a little more motion.

Still, for the most part, you’re very capable of handling Dead Space’s many, many protracted battles with various kinds of necromorphs. Lots of the game’s encounters are of the one-on-one ambush variety, but when you really get into a fight, it’ll be in a largish room in which you’re locked until you’ve killed all the “foreign material” within it. And these battles require quite a bit of work on the player’s part — enemies come fast and hit hard, even on the Normal difficulty, and you’ll need to act fast to keep your guns reloaded, aim and dismember enemies, stomp the ones that are still crawling after you, and address threats that are coming up behind you. There are no puzzles to speak of, which is kind of a bummer: these “locked in a room” battles are fun, but they’re also the only formula the game has to work with. Killing everything is the only thing barring you from continuing forward.

The guys at Iron Monkey worked closely with Visceral Games, the developer behind the Xbox and Playstation versions of Dead Space and Dead Space 2, and the result is pretty phenomenal for fans. The story works pretty well and the iPhone version very accurately captures the same dread and atmosphere the console games depict. Using console Dead Space’s music helps (a lot), as does strong voice acting and mostly awesome graphics. The game has plenty gory and is packed full of monsters, and even includes some zero-gravity rooms and fighting — exactly what you want out of a mobile version of Dead Space.

The drawback of hitting the Dead Space feel so accurately, unfortunately, is that there’s a real lack of anything new. You’ll get to play with the Core Extractor, a new beam-based weapon, but it’s not substantially different from what you’re used to. The rest of the game pretty accurately mirrors what you get on other platforms. How you play is somewhat distinct, but what you see, hear and experience is not.

Apart from the control issues, an audio glitch sometimes kills chunks of dialogue. It only seems to affect speech, which is a big bummer because the game loses story, which is what Dead Space is really all about. The rest of the audio is pretty great, especially with headphones on, and the sounds of monsters is usually your only clue in the dark as to what is on its way to murder you, and from where. But the dialogue loss is persistent: it doesn’t happen during most dialogue events, but it happened four or so times during my playthrough, and there’s just not a ton of dialogue to begin with.

Despite those problems, stacked against the overall experience, generally great production values, and repeated scares, the issues really don’t amount to much. Dead Space is a mobile game with the quality of a console experience. It runs $6.99 on iTunes, which is a lot for a mobile game, but the price feels equal to the game you receive — especially given the Hard mode you open up after finishing the game, the New Game + mode that lets you change your tactics and amp up your character to earn more achievements, and the unlockables you get in Dead Space 2 for registering the game. It’s one of the stronger experiences on the platform that could be an entry point for hardcore gamers to see what the iPhone is capable of creating — and it’s certainly worth a download.

Pros:

A genuinely scary, atmospheric and tense experience

Accurately captures all that’s great about Dead Space on consoles

Smartly designed touch controls that maximize the platform’s capabilities while remaining familiar

Strong story that meshes well with the console games

Great graphics, great sound, great voice acting

Whole lot of monsters to kill and dark corridors to explore

Cons:

Audio glitch can cause dialogue to disappear

Controls sometimes feel finicky, especially in tense moments

Combat can be weak, especially when you’re not used to the aiming mechanic, because of Vandal’s tank-like movements